Francis Russell Hittinger, a legal and philosophical scholar at the University of Tulsa, is one of only three lay people to serve in multiple ponitifical academies, essentially think tanks for the Vatican. He has worked with the last three popes to help craft papal encyclicals, and he was among a group of scholars who laid the foundation for Pope Francis’ Laudato Si. That encyclical has drawn worldwide attention for its focus on the pope’s concern about human impact on the environment as well as his warnings about the increasingly cold and technocratic hand of power.

Why was it important for this pope, who has never been to America, to come now?

He originally decided to come because he was invited to go to this festival of Catholic family life in Philadelphia, but some important things happened between him saying yes and what’s going on today. The first thing that happened is the Vatican helped negotiate this agreement between the United States and Cuba. That was an important deal. So the pope decided, not only will I go to America, I will go to Cuba. He also wanted to go to Mexico and enter the U.S. through a border crossing. That didn’t work out.

The second reason he came to the United States is this great issue of migration and immigration. He is the son of an immigrant. He’s from Argentina. He’s a native Spanish speaker. And north of 40 percent of all male children under 18 years old in the United States right now are Latino. We have become a very important country for everyone in this western hemisphere, which is largely Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking. It was natural for him to come for all of these reasons.

Much has been said about Pope Francis’ theology, and he’s been described as liberal. But it seems his thinking is more nuanced than the left/right boxes of American politics?

It’s a very strong social justice message. The liberals did not invent the term social justice. That actually goes back to the Catholic Church of the 19th century.

What about other elements of his theology on subjects like abortion or gay marriage?

He’s very traditional. He has no interest in changing fundamental issues of Catholic doctrine. His interest is overwhelmingly on the side of action. He said this to the bishops in Washington. He said, we know what we believe, and now it’s our job to say it correctly and to go out and dialogue and to learn how to act, not just how to think correctly.

You helped lay the foundation for Laudato Si, the pope’s encyclical on ecology and the environment. Why is this document so important?

The pope is convinced we’re facing two global crises at the same time. The one global crisis we are going to call the problem of global warming, excessive carbon emissions and other kinds of pollution. That’s a big crisis because it doesn’t just pertain to Italy, or Argentina or the United States or China. It’s truly global. No one gets off with a free pass on the global warming crisis.

The other crisis is what he calls the technocratic crisis. This is everywhere from Beijing to Washington, D.C., to London to Moscow. Our global elite, the people who are in charge of leading us and protecting the common good and who protect our important institutions from universities to banks to businesses, they think technocratically. That means they don’t think socially, culturally or morally. They think rather in terms of numbers and cost/benefit. It tends to be a very short-term way of thinking. The pope does not deny the efficacy of technocratic thinking. The crisis now is everyone thinks primarily in these terms and it’s not well-suited for dealing with something as culturally, politically and morally complicated as the issue of the global environment — something that also involves issues of inter-generational justice. What do we owe to our children, our grandchildren and those who are not even born yet? It has to do with the poor because the poor often [have] access only to the least-efficient kinds of energy. The poor burn animal dung to cook because it is the cheapest fuel they can find. Just thinking about it in terms of the numbers and cost benefit falls well short of the kind of synthetic thinking we have to engage in together all over the world. Pope Francis calls this wider point of view “integral ecology.”

In his speech to Congress, Pope Francis used the term solidarity four times. This can ring as collectivism in American ears. But it’s not so simple, is it?

It is true that when most Americans hear the word solidarity, the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of political party or labor union or even Marxism. That’s a caricature. The word solidarity comes from Roman law. We are talking almost 3,000 years ago. What it really means is someone has a liability for another person. It’s that we are in the same boat together even if we are sea sick, and we have responsibility for one another. That’s the original meaning of the term, and when the Catholic Church started using it they made it clear they meant a moral solidarity and a social solidarity.

Compare Francis to his predecessors, Benedict XVI and John Paul II.

John Paul II was a rare combination of a very gregarious man who was also a deep philosopher. When I used to go up to the Pontifical apartments in the Vatican, we would go to early morning mass with him, about 10 or 15 of us. No one left the room until he had shaken everyone’s hand and he’d cracked jokes. He had a very rare kind of friendliness, and he also had the aura of being a great man.

Benedict XVI was unfailingly gentle and a bit shy, as well as being a very deep theologian. One day I was waiting to meet with him in the pontifical apartments, and he was late. He had been in a meeting for three hours about the priest (pedophilia) scandal. He was the person who started to clean it up. When he came into the room, I could tell he was exhausted. You could always tell with Benedict, this job of being pope was a bit of a rough and tumble. He was a soft-spoken and very gentle scholar.

Francis, on the other hand, has this incredible ability to cut right to the heart of everything. He tells you what you weren’t expecting to hear, and he moves you out of your comfort zone immediately.

I had to greet Pope Francis right after he became pope, on behalf of my academy. He comes through the door, walks over, he looks me in the eye and says, “Does this thing have any life in it?” I nodded and said, somewhat sheepishly, ‘Si, Santo Padre.’” He cuts right to the nerves. Sometimes he does it gently. I thought he was very gentle with Congress. Sometimes it’s not so gentle. And his speech to the bishops had a lot more tension in the atmosphere. He is a remarkable man with a very strong gospel social justice message, and he is wasting no time.

This Q&A was conducted and edited by editorial writer Rudolph Bush. Reach him at rbush@dallasnews.com.